Nigella Lawson has written eleven bestselling cookery books including the classics How to Eat and How To Be A Domestic Goddess – the book that inspired a whole new generation of bakers. These books, and her TV series, have made her a household name around the world. 
 
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Nigella Lawson

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Irvine Welsh

Hilarious, shocking and hugely entertaining, Reheated Cabbage has all the classic Irvine Welsh ingredients 
 
In Reheated Cabbage you can enjoy Christmas dinner with Begbie and discover how aliens addicted to Embassy Regal have Midlothian under surveillance. You will meet a husband who values a televised Hibs v Hearts game more than his wife's life and see two guys fighting over a beautiful girl agree - after a few pills and pints of lager - that their friendship is actually more important. And you will be delighted to welcome back 'Juice' Terry Lawson, and to watch what happens when he meets his old nemesis under the strobe-lights of a Miami Beach nightclub. 
 
'The stories combine sly humour with the tang of lived experience. It makes for a terrific collection, showcasing a writer who...has blossomed into one of the most distinctive, and distinguished, observers of British life' Sunday Telegraph

Reheated Cabbage

Amos Oz

Eight interlinked family dramas set on an Israeli kibbutz from the masterful storyteller behind A Tale of Love and Darkness 
 
 
‘On the kibbutz it’s hard to know. We’re all supposed to be friends but very few really are’ 
 
 Ariella, unhappy in love, confides in the woman whose husband she stole. 
 
 Nahum, a devoted father, can’t find the words to challenge his daughter’s promiscuous lover. 
 
 The old idealists deplore the apathy of the young, while the young are so used to kibbutz life that they can’t work out if they’re impassioned or indifferent. 
 
In this short story collection Amos Oz reveals the secrets and frustrations of the human heart 
 
‘Lucid and heartbreaking’ Guardian

Between Friends

Karen Russell

Charting loss, love, and the difficult art of growing up, these stories unfurl with wicked humour and insight. Two young boys make midnight trips to a boat graveyard in search of their dead sister, who set sail in the exoskeleton of a giant crab; a boy whose dreams foretell implacable tragedies is sent to 'Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers' (Cabin 1, Narcoleptics; Cabin 2, Insomniacs; Cabin 3, Somnambulists. . . ); a Minotaur leads his family on the trail out West, and finally, in the collection's poignant and hilarious title story, fifteen girls raised by wolves are painstakingly re-civilised by nuns.

St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Ben Okri

To enter the world of Ben Okri's stories is to surrender to a new reality. Set in the chaotic streets of Lagos and the jungle heart of Nigeria, all the laws of cause and effect, fact and fiction, are suspended. It is a world where the lives of the powerless veer terrifyingly close to nightmare. In rich, lyrical, almost hallucinatory prose Ben Okri guides us through the fabulous and the mundane, the serene and the randomly violent. The unrelenting Nigerian heat and the implacable darkness of the black-out and the military curfew are the backdrops for his characters each finding their own ways to survive. We witness their dogged resistance to impotence, their unquenchable humour and their insistence on the possibility of love in the face of terror. Written with the lucid clarity and logic of dream, Stars of the New Curfew is a book of visionary imagination.

Stars Of The New Curfew

Rebecca Navarro, best-selling authoress of Regency romances, suffers a paralysing stroke. Assisted by her nurse, Rebecca plans her revenge on her unfaithful husband. But will Freddy Royle, hospital trustee, celebrity and necrophiliac, thwart those plans? Dave Thornton, soccer thug, has lost his heart to flawed beauty Samantha Worthington. Together they go in search of the man who marketed the drug that crippled her - in order to cripple him. Lloyd from Leith has a transfiguring passion for the unhappily married Heather. Together they explore the true nature of house music and chemical romance. Will their ardour fizzle and die in the grim backstreets of Edinburgh, or will it ignite and blaze like a thousand suns?

Ecstasy

Three Tales of Chemical Romance

Helen Simpson

A sensational short story collection from Britain's master of the genre. 
 
Charting tantrums, funerals, pregnancy and love affairs, these stories unroll with piercing wit and compassion. One woman finds grief for her lost lover is assuaged when she invests in a new front door. Another grows increasingly frustrated as the grim reaper scythes through her circle, with farcical and tragic results. 
 
Elsewhere, a chain-smoker’s brush with death appears to help him reassess his priorities, a south London builder avenges the duping of his adored mother, and a phlebotomist’s relationship is pushed to it limits by her preoccupation with war. And in the title story, a teacher’s circular walk on Hampstead Heath leads to revelations about mourning, ageing, and new life. 
 
‘A masterful contemporary exponent of the genre. Simpson now deserves to be compared with Flannery O'Connor and Alice Munro’ Robert McCrum, Observer

Constitutional

Bernard MacLaverty

Any book of stories from Bernard MacLaverty is a cause for celebration, but Matters of Life and Death is more than that, as it is - without question - one of the finest contemporary examples of the short story as a genre. 
 
Beginning with the sudden, nauseating terror of a family caught up in an explosion of shocking sectarian violence and ending with the white-out of an Iowa blizzard and a different kind of fear, Matters of Life and Death is a book about bonds and connections, made and broken, secret and known. Vivid, beautifully controlled and written with effortless skill and empathy, these stories are object lessons in the art of short fiction.

Matters of Life & Death

Rachel Seiffert

Rachel Seiffert, author of The Dark Room, powerfully evokes our need for human connection in this brilliant and haunting group of stories. From the title piece, in which a young biologist conceals his discoveries at a polluted river from a local woman, to the family aided by an enemy in 'The Crossing', to the old man weighing his regrets in 'Francis John Jones, 1924 -' Seiffert's acclaimed, refined prose movingly captures the lives of her characters in their most essential, secret moments. 
 
A Rocky Mountain News Best Book of the Year.

Field Study

Julian Barnes

In these seventeen essays (and one short story) the 2011 Man Booker Prize winner examines British, French and American writers who have meant most to him, as well as the cross-currents and overlappings of their different cultures. From the deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald to the directness of Hemingway, from Kipling's view of France to the French view of Kipling, from the many translations of Madame Bovary to the fabulations of Ford Madox Ford, from the National Treasure Status of George Orwell to the despair of Michel Houellebecq, Julian Barnes considers what fiction is, and what it can do. As he writes in his preface, 'Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.' 
 
When his Letters from London came out in 1995, the Financial Times called him 'our best essayist'. This wise and deft collection confirms that judgment.

Through the Window

Seventeen Essays (and one short story)

A. S. Byatt

A new collection of stories from A. S. Byatt is always a winner, and this one takes an unexpected turn, bringing shivers as well as delights. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two middle-aged women walk into a forest, as they did when they were girls, confronting their fears and memories and the strange thing they saw in their childhood - or thought they saw - so long ago. A distinguished obstetrician and young woman artist find they have sharply contrasting ideas about body parts, birth and death; an innocent member of an evening class harbours unexpected view on 'raw material'. The stories in this marvellous collection are by turns funny, spooky, sparkling and haunting. The Little Black Book of Stories holds its secrets, adding a dark quality to Byatt's famous skill in mixing folk and fairy tale with everyday life.

The Little Black Book of Stories

Kurt Vonnegut

Look at the Birdie evokes a world in which squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town Lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence. In "Confido," a family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. In "Ed Luby's Key Club," a man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. In "Look at the Birdie," a quack psychiatrist turned "murder counsellor" concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. The stories are cautionary they also brim with his trademark humour. 
 
Wry, ironic, satirical and poignant Look at the Birdie reflects the anxieties of the postwar era in which they were written and provides an insight into the development of Vonnegut's early style

Look at the Birdie

Kirsty Logan

'Absolutely obsessed. Savage, strange and spicy' Lucy Rose, author of Lamb 
 
Can 'no' be a declaration of love? What happens when love is savage, dangerous and all-consuming? In this gorgeous and unsettling collection, women navigate the complexities and cruelties of desire across time and place, from a medieval convent to a Victorian parlour to a 1990s high school. 
 
* An expectant mother feeds raw meat to the wasp's nest in her shed. 
* A pair of sapphic lovers use ghost possession to fleece money from lecherous men. 
* One woman in wartime London discovers that she loves her husband much more as a ghost. 
* A teenage girl becomes infatuated with a bloodthirsty succubus. 
 
Intensely atmospheric, surprising and darkly funny, this collection is a richly flavoured feast from a brilliant writer in full command of the form. 
 
'Unsettling and addictive, glistening with transgressive thrills and erotic appetites' Daily Mail 
 
'Gleefully depraved, gloriously queer and thrillingly bold' Leon Craig, author of Parallel Hells 
 
'A dark delight, steeped in blood red honey' Heather Parry, author of Orpheus Builds A Girl 
 
'A gothic homage to the visceral, haunting, unnerving nature of human connection' Alice Slater, author of Death of a Bookseller 
 
'Full of strange beauty and shining humour' Stylist 
 
'No one writes about the horrific and the erotic, and the tangled up intersections of both, like Kirsty Logan' Anna Bogutskaya, author of Feeding The Monster 
 
'Darkly graceful, innovative, sexy and funny. Kirsty Logan is a jewel' Camilla Grudova, author of The Doll's Alphabet 
 
'Crackling with smarts, marvellously formally varied, deliciously strange' Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie 
 
KIRSTY LOGAN WAS SELECTED AS ONE OF BRITAIN'S TEN MOST OUTSTANDING LGBTQ WRITERS by Val McDermid for the International Literature Showcase in 2019

No & Other Love Stories

Janice Galloway

In her latest collection of stories, Janice Galloway turns her unflinching gaze on relationships: the struggle to love against the odds, the overpowering yearning to communicate, and the extraordinary epiphanies where the World falls away leaving only the lovers. Love is, of course, where you find it, and it is here in an evening walk across a London bridge, a chip-shop pizza, Derek's mouth, or ham sandwiches cut into hearts. A brilliant observer of human frailty and tenderness, Janice Galloway examines the moments where lives split like a stone, where people are healed or broken by a word or the touch of a hand. Savagely accurate, vivid and unsentimental, these are painstakingly crafted stories: engaging, caustic, funny and terrifyingly true.

Where You Find It

Tibor Fischer

A dazzling collection of short fiction, containing stories published in New Writing and the Times Literary Supplement, as well as several new stories. The Novella 'I Like being Killed' takes the lid off the comedy scene in London, investigates where jokes come from and how you can make people laugh with only one toothpick and a foreskin. Other stories visit Brixton prison and German bookshops, contemplate the tanning of Russian bottoms on the Côte d'Azur, offer advice on driving during Romanian revolutions, explain what to do with fifty uselessnesses, give tips on successful and painless serial killing and demonstrate conclusively that no-one should live in South London.

Don't Read This Book If You're Stupid

Joseph O'Connor

Ranging from urgently contemporary London and Dublin to New York's Lower East Side in the nineteenth century, from dark comedy to poignancy, from the wryly provocative to the quietly beautiful, these stories - Joseph O'Connor's first collection in more than twenty years - offer a gathering of dreamers and lost souls who contend with the confusions of living. 
 
Here are men without women, children parenting parents, residents of the uncertain country that is post-boom Ireland, emigrants, travellers, cheats and lovers, families, friends and foes.

Where Have You Been?

Salman Rushdie

This dazzling collection of short stories explores the allure and confusion of what happens when East meets West. Fantasy and realism collide as a rickshaw driver writes letters home describing his film star career in Bombay; a mispronunciation leads to romance and an unusual courtship in sixties London; two childhood friends turned diplomats live out fantasies hatched by Star Trek; and Christopher Columbus dreams of consummating his relationship with Queen Isabella. With one foot in the East and one foot in the West, this collection reveals the oceanic distances and the unexpected intimacies between the two.

East, West

Emma Cline

'Taut, beautiful and savage' Guardian 
 
A man travels to his son's school to deal with the fallout of a violent attack and to make sure his son will not lose his college place. But what exactly has his son done? And who is to blame? 
 
A young woman trying to make it in LA, working in a clothes shop while taking acting classes, turns to a riskier way of making money but will be forced to confront the danger of the game she's playing. 
 
And a family coming together for Christmas struggle to skate over the lingering darkness caused by the very ordinary brutality of a troubled husband and father. 
 
 Subtle, sophisticated and displaying an extraordinary understanding of human behaviour, these stories from the best-selling author of The Girls are unforgettable. 
______________________ 
 
PRAISE FOR DADDY: 
'It is her piercing understanding of modern humiliation that makes these stories vibrate with life...brilliant' Brandon Taylor 
'Razor-sharp' Evening Standard 
'Cline's talent at uncovering the seedy and somehow bringing it to beautiful light is brilliant' Daisy Johnson 
'Something about Cline's intimate tone, her talent for conjuring the feeling of being alive, is entirely and uniquely her own' Rachel Kushner 
'A stunning collection of stories that plunges deep into the dark corners of the human experience' Dazed

Daddy

Alice Munro

THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 
 
The characters who populate an Alice Munro story live and breathe. Passions hopelessly conceived, affections betrayed, marriages made and broken: the joys, fears, loves and awakenings of women echo throughout these twelve unforgettable stories, laying bare the unexceptional and yet inescapable pain of human contact.

The Moons of Jupiter

An awkward teen with a terrible haircut has a reversal of fortune when he finds artefacts from the future lining a seagulls’ nest. 
 
In a godforsaken barn, Presidents Eisenhower, John Adams and Rutherford B. Hayes are bemused to find themselves reincarnated as horses. 
 
Clyde and Magreb – he a traditional capes-and-coffins vampire, she the more progressive variety – settle in an Italian lemon grove in the hope that its ripe fruit will keep their thirst for blood at bay. 
 
‘Russell can take Antarctic tailgaters, an army of seagulls or simply a window and twist a tale that explodes on the page and lingers in the mind’ The Times

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

A.L. Kennedy

The stories collected in Original Bliss are concerned, appropriately, with the complexities of sex and the lack of it. In the long novella that gives the book its title, Helen Brindle thinks she has lost God - but it is simply love that she's missing. She can't find it at home, with the violent, deadly Mr Brindle, but will she find it in Stuttgart when she meets the enigmatic Edward E. Gluck, with his Process and his paraphernalia? And what happens when her father confessor starts to confess? A beautiful and terrifying examination of passion and pornography, of the aching need for completion and healing.

Original Bliss

David Lodge

The first collection of short stories from one of Britain's finest novelists and critics 
 
A nameless man who has fallen out of love with life, refuses to get out of bed, with unexpected consequences. A sociologist recalls how he learned his first and formative lesson about the oppressive power of capitalism selling newspapers and magazines up and down the platforms of Waterloo station. Some years before the era of the Pill and the Permissive Society, four university friends travel to the Mediterranean for their first holiday together, where the climate is sultry and sex is on everyone’s mind. And a strong-willed young woman defies adverse circumstances to pursue the perfect wedding at all costs. 
 
These are some of the characters that populate David Lodge’s shrewd, funny and delightfully entertaining short stories, collected here for the very first time. What prompted their publication in this form is a short story in itself, told by the author in his Foreword. 
 
LONGLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE 2017

The Man Who Wouldn't Get Up and Other Stories

A luminous selection of short stories from the prize-winning imagination of A. S. Byatt 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MITCHELL 
 
Mirrors shatter at the hairdressers when a middle-aged client explodes in rage. Snow dusts the warm body of a princess honing it into something sharp and frosted. Summer sunshine flickers on the face of a smiling child who may or may not be real. 
 
Medusa's Ankles celebrates the very best of A. S. Byatt's short fiction, carefully selected from a lifetime of writing. Peopled by artists, poets and fabulous creatures, the stories blaze with creativity and travel from Ancient myth to an English sweet factory, a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, a Turkish bazaar to a fairytale palace. 
 
Driven by curiosity, Byatt takes her readers beyond the veneer of the ordinary and the gloss of the fantastical, to a place rich in ideas, vivid in colour and wholly unforgettable. 
 
'A cabinet of curiosities... Glitteringly beautiful. Byatt is a vivid colourist' Sunday Times 
 
'A cerebral extravaganza, bristling with ideas' Spectator 
 
'These little stories by one of Britain's foremost grandes dames of the writing world are a delightful surprise, packing a much greater punch than many full-length novels... They are moving, thought-provoking, witty and shocking all at once' Sunday Telegraph

Medusa’s Ankles

Selected Stories from the Booker Prize Winner

Tessa Hadley

Everyday life crackles with the electricity sparking between men and women, between parents and children, between friends. A son confesses to his mother that he is cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with her lecturer and embarks on an affair with a man in the pub who looks just like him. Young mothers pent-up in childcare dream treacherously of other possibilities; a boy becomes aware of the woman, a guest at his parents' holiday home, who is pressing up too close against him on the beach. 
 
Hidden away inside the present, the past is explosive; the future can open unexpectedly out of any chance encounter; ordinary moments are illuminated with lightning flashes of dread or pleasure. These stories about family life are somehow undomesticated and dangerous.

Sunstroke and Other Stories

Comprising stories from her debut collection, Blood, and the critically acclaimed Where You Find It - this collection presents some of the best known and most loved works by one of Scotland's 'most gifted and original writers' (Times Literary Supplement). 
 
Each sharply observed, savagely accurate and brilliantly realised - the stories offer revelatory glimpses into everyday lives - from an unwelcome act of kindness at a bus stop, an evening walk across a London bridge, a welcome but uncomfortable summer break to a brutal lesson in trust. 
 
Here also are unflinching portrayals of relationships: the struggle to love against the odds, the overpowering yearning to communicate, and the extraordinary epiphanies where the world falls away leaving only the lovers. 
 
These are painstakingly crafted stories: engaging, funny and terrifyingly true, from a master of the form.

Collected Stories

Daisy Johnson

A place of myths, rumours and secrets, The Hotel looms over the dark Fens, tall and grey in its Gothic splendour. Built on cursed land, a history of violent death suffuses its very foundations –yet it has a magnetism that is impossible to ignore. 
 
On entering The Hotel, different people react in different ways. To some it is familiar, to others a stranger. Many come out refreshed, longing to return. But a few are changed forever, haunted by their time there. And almost all those affected are women... 
 
They are children and mothers, monsters, cult film-makers, thrill-seekers and workers on the night shift, all with their own tales of its strange power, of the horrors of Room 63, and of desperate but failed attempts to escape its seductive pull.

The Hotel

Roddy Doyle

Love and marriage, children and family, death and grief. Life touches everyone the same, but living under lockdown? It changes us alone. 
 
A man abroad wanders the stag-and-hen-strewn streets of Newcastle, as news of the virus at home asks him to question his next move. An exhausted nurse struggles to let go, having lost a much-loved patient in isolation. A middle-aged son, barred from his mother's funeral, wakes to an oncoming hangover of regret. Told with Doyle's signature warmth, wit and extraordinary eye for the richness that underpins the quiet of our lives, Life Without Children cuts to the heart of how we are all navigating loss, loneliness and the shifting of history underneath our feet. 
 
'Life Without Children is boldly exhilarating, with its revelations of quiet love and the sheer charm of the characters' voices' Sunday Times 
 
'Quietly devastating...shivers with emotion' Financial Times 
 
'In the stripping away of everyday anxieties, the virus reveals what matters most, those qualities that are always at the heart of Doyle's fiction: love and connection' Observer 
 
'Moving...and beautiful' Daily Mail

Life Without Children

The exhilarating new short story collection from the Booker Prize-winning author

Stories

Margaret Atwood

The new collection from the legendary Atwood is led by the story of a married couple as they travel the road together, the moments big and small that make up a long life of love -- and what comes after 
 
My heart is broken, Nell thinks. But in our family we don’t say, ‘My heart is broken.’ We say, ‘Are there any cookies?’ 
 
In this dazzling collection of stories we meet beloved cats, George Orwell, a daughter whose mother may or may not be a witch, a cabal of elderly female academics, and an alien tasked with retelling human fairy tales. And we meet and re-meet Nell and Tig, a long-married couple, and see the moments big and small that make up a life of love – and what comes after. 
 
 
'She's Margaret Atwood, and she can do anything' Ann Patchett 
 
'There is no greater living writer' Daily Telegraph 
 
'The outstanding novelist of our age' Sunday Times 
 
'A living legend' New York Times Book Review

Old Babes in the Wood

True Believers introduces us to a world of characters stunning in their variety. Here are sad-hearted priests, old friends, young lovers, rockers and rebels. Here are runaway husbands and runaway wives. Here are jokers and fanatics, punks and poets, thinkers and drinkers, chancers and killers. Here are the true believers, all clinging desperately to some kind of faith in a mutable and dangerous world.

True Believers

Exposing and exploring the sinuous undercurrents of violence, anguish and love, A.L. Kennedy examines the nature of the individual, both in isolation and society, as characters define and deny their chosen identities. While showing us the unlikeliness of intimacy and the impossibility of communication, Kennedy also reveals the subversive liberation of impotence, the humour of discomfort as human beings chafe together, the crazed claustrophobia of the family adn the wildly funny results of an eccentricity unleashed.

Now That You're Back

James Lasdun

In sharply evoked settings that range from the wilds of Northern Greece to the beaches of Cape Cod, these intensely dramatic tales chart the metamorphoses of their characters as they fall prey to the gamut of human passions. The lives in them seethe with love, hate, desire, fear, tender corruption and cruel idealism. They rise to unexpected heights of decency, stumble into comic or tragic folly, they throw themselves open to lust, longing, paranoia - but they are always recognisably, illuminatingly, our lives. 
 
Winner of the BBC National Short Story Award.

It's Beginning To Hurt

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